


Remarkable Things

by racketghost, soft_october



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Canon Compliant, Fluff and Angst, Fluff and Humor, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-26
Updated: 2020-09-26
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:21:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26665876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/racketghost/pseuds/racketghost, https://archiveofourown.org/users/soft_october/pseuds/soft_october
Summary: Aziraphale would never use a miracle for something as banal as a table in a restaurant. Not ordinarily, at least. But Crowley did look a tad rough around the edges, and while Aziraphale was certain the demon would stand on the line out in the sun with no more than the usual amount of fuss if asked to - well.A bit of reality twisting never hurt anyone. Not really.He hoped.andHe had ambushed him.Yes, okay, fine. Perhaps he hadn’t, not really, not without being incredibly hyperbolic and perhaps a bit dramatic. But the angel had just appeared, out of nowhere, in the middle of a crowded and overly warm tavern, looking flushed and soft and entirely too fucking touchable and had begun saying things like let me tempt you. To oysters. Oysters.One meal, from two different perspectives.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 93
Kudos: 340
Collections: GO-Events POV Pairs Works





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey its me, soft_october! Writing this with racket was super fun, and I hope you enjoy this chapter full of my brand of fluff and nonsense. 
> 
> Also I know that this isn't how roman restaurants worked don't @ me lol

Petronius could _truly_ do remarkable things with oysters. 

At least that’s what _everyone_ who was standing in line outside the restaurant was claiming in muttered whispers to whichever strangers were standing next to them in a desperate bid to convince themselves that standing out here in the heat for several hours was, you know, _totally_ worth it. 

By all rights, the angel and the demon who approached should have dutifully taken their place at the back of the line, but by a remarkable coincidence, a table opened up just as he and Crowley approached and no one on the rather long line seemed to notice as an ethereal and angelic being slipped into the vacant seats. 

“What luck,” Aziraphale remarked as they settled onto the bench. 

“Is that what they’re calling it these days?” Crowley muttered with a smirk. 

“I have _no idea_ what you could _possibly_ be referring to.” 

Aziraphale would _never_ use a miracle for something as banal as a table in a restaurant _._ Not _ordinarily_ , at least. But Crowley did look a tad rough around the edges, and while Aziraphale was certain the demon would stand on the line out in the sun with no more than the usual amount of fuss if asked to - well. 

A _bit_ of reality twisting never hurt anyone. Not _really_. 

He hoped.

Aziraphale assuaged himself for perhaps misusing miracles by using further miracles to ensure that they weren't served as well as seated before everyone else. There was a thought worrying in the back of his head, something along the lines of how two wrongs definitely made a right. 

Or was it that they _didn’t_? 

Well, no matter. It would give the two of them time to talk, at least, the way they hadn’t for several decades. He could examine that thought, hold the desire to speak with a footsoldier The Enemy up to the light and see why it seemed to sparkle so, but Aziraphale hadn’t spent several thousand years crossing over Crowley’s orbit without several paper thin layers of plausible deniability. To examine such a thought now would certainly spoil the game, so he allowed it to glide off the surface of his thoughts like water off a very smooth duck’s back. 

Crowley was predictably disinclined to discuss what brought him to Rome and distressed him to the point of almost rudeness, so Aziraphale filled the space between them as they waited (and waited, and _waited_ , maybe he had overdone it this time) for their food and wine with chatter about the weather (almost “ _too_ much sun, is if there could be such a thing!”), all the new lovely building projects going up around the city (he almost struck a passing waiter when his hands flew about to describe the scope of the improvements to the forum but at least there was wine on the table now), and what he’d been getting up to (“not sure why this Claudius fellow needed to be in such a place but - well, you know ours is not to question why!”). Crowley muttered about the heat, redirected the waiter to another table so the poor boy didn’t catch a wayward angelic palm to the face, and clammed up entirely when Aziraphale mentioned Claudius, waving away the angel’s concerns with claims of indigestion from the wine he did not stop drinking. Aziraphale shrugged it off, he was quite used to Crowley’s idiosyncrasies at this stage of their relationship (not that it was a relationship! Not at all! It was - hrm - they were - well they were colleagues, at best, really), and launched them into a game of attempting to name all of the flatbreads on the menu at that little place in Jerusalem they used to frequent a few decades prior. 

“I cannot say I ever spared much attention on the bread,” Crowley finally admitted, when Aziraphale has been doing all the heavy lifting on the names. Aziraphale pursed his lips, considered mentioning the time one of the goats outside the place had given Crowley a dreadful bite right on his - well, it was Crowley’s fault for turning his back to them in the first place. 

“But the _sweet_ ones!” Aziraphale cried instead. “The one with the figs and honey, you loved that one!” 

“No,” Crowley corrected, “ _You_ loved the one covered in honey and figs, _I_ preferred the one with the pomegranates.” 

“You _would_ prefer the pomegranates,” Aziraphale said with a sly smile.

“What’s _that_ supposed to mean?” Crowley returned his grin, and before Aziraphale could talk about a certain garden and a certain tree and just why _he_ thought Crowley _just might_ be partial to pomegranates a girl - Petronius’ daughter, if Aziraphale were any judge of such things - placed a plate of a dozen oysters on the table between them and at the sight of them Crowley made a noise that was something between a laugh and a groan. 

“Ah, here they are!” Aziraphale ignored Crowley’s noises and instead surveyed the line of shells and glistening morsels within with the eye of a farmer observing a fine olive crop.

Crowley stared at the oysters like they were bound to rear up and bite him on the nose at any moment the same way that goat had at his backside. 

“People _eat_ these, Angel?” he drawled after a moment. 

“People eat _garum_ , Crowley,” he replied with a smile, and Crowley’s entire face collapsed like a dying star at the mention of Rome’s famous fermented fish sauce. “But there’s none of that on these,” Aziraphale said quickly, lest Crowley give up on the idea altogether. “Just a spicy sort of tang. Vinegar, I think.” 

With an arched eyebrow, Crowley lifted an oyster from the plate and sniffed at it experimentally, and Aziraphale beamed like the sun when he placed it back down with a “Smells good enough, I suppose.” He continued to glare at them before his eyes flashed back towards Aziraphale. 

“How do you eat them?” The demon sounded so incredulous, so out of his depth that Aziraphale could not help but laugh as he plucked one from the plate and placed it into Crowley’s outstretched fingers. 

“And then you sort of raise it to your lips and tip it back -” Crowley shrugged at his oyster and followed Aziraphale’s instructions. He made a face at once, which tempered into something - while not resembling the ecstatic sort of pleasure Aziraphale found in a good morsel - was at least marginally better than the glare Crowley had been wearing since Aziraphale first spotted him in Rome. 

With a warm bit of joy blooming in his chest at the thought, Aziraphale took a second shell from the plate, tipped the oyster into his mouth and made a delighted sort of sound as the spiced vinegar hit his tongue. 

It was at this _exact_ moment that Crowley promptly choked on his own oyster and knocked his cup of wine to the ground. 

Aziraphale thought he was making that noise again, or being rather dramatic in his dislike of the dish and it was a moment (and several wheezing breaths) before he realized that Crowley was in earnest. 

“Crowley-” Aziraphale reached across the table with concern, but Crowley gently batted his questioning hand away, shaking his head, his coughs only increasing in rapidity and volume. 

“Crowley you just have to -” The heimlich maneuver (or something approximating it, anyway) wouldn’t be invented for a thousand or so years, but that didn’t mean Aziraphale didn’t know what to _do_. He received _excellent_ marks in the human anatomy class he’d been forced to take before they sent him down to Eden. 

But Crowley wasn’t _doing_ anything except allowing his coughs to evolve into wheezes, and was far past the point of _listening_. Now people were staring and as it became obvious that Crowley wasn’t about to _fix_ the oyster currently lodged in his corporation’s windpipe, Aziraphale took it upon himself to place his fingers on Crowley’s throat and miracle the thing away. He cooled Crowley down for good measure, because my _word_ did Crowley’s skin feel unusually warm!

“Alright there, Crowley?” The demon shoved the glasses up on his face, nodded while his face turned an interesting shade of pink, and then became overly fascinated in something happening in the street outside. Aziraphale chuckled at Crowley’s penchant for distraction and took the opportunity to right his cup of wine. The wine, against all laws of physics and time, was back in the cup, because what was one more miracle, at this point? Aziraphale doubted anyone was even keeping track! 

“Sorry,” Crowley mumbled. 

“Nonsense,” Aziraphale waved away the apology. “Please, the rest won’t treat you nearly as poorly, I assure you.”

“Ordered them to do no harm, did you?”

“Never!”

“Lying, angel?” Crowley showed a bit of teeth, and his glasses had fallen back down his nose. “As I recall _lying_ was a sin.”

“Very well, I did not _order_ them to do no harm, I merely _strongly suggested_ that they -”

“No need to _shout_ , Aziraphale,” Crowley said, picking up another oyster as if it has been his intention all along. “People are starting to stare.” He ate this second, then a third, and Aziraphale realized that if he did not join in soon, the entire plate would be consumed before he could snatch another. 

They ordered three more plates and several more cups of wine. 

“Unicorns!” Crowley shouted at the thinning crowd. Aziraphale tried to shush him, but devolved into a fit of giggles instead. “That’s what they were called!”

“Horses with swords on their heads.”

“Magnificent creatures!” Crowley banged his cup against the wooden table. “Miss them.”

“Miss them,” Aziraphale repeated. “Miss them miss them. How silly that sounds!” 

“Misssss themmmm,” Crowley said again, drawing out the s and the m. “Hardly sounds like anything at all the more you say it. Miss the Eutruscans too.”

“Lovely pottery,” Aziraphale agreed. 

“Lovely wine _in_ the pottery.”

“Didn’t I see you at a winery -”

“My feet were _covered_ in purple for _weeks_ afterward -”

“Wine was so sweet, didn’t we share it -”

“Sicily, you were there to make sure some Trojan went the wrong way and I was -”

“Some temptation or another, strange how we keep ending up in the same place, almost as if -”

“It’s all Her plan, Crowley, you know that, I’m sure there’s a reason -”

“I know there’s a reason we’re both out of wine, and it has nothing to do with Her at all!”

“Well we should remedy that at once!” 

They both reached for the tankard of wine on the table (that had been left there by the exasperated serving girl after their eighth or ninth refill) and that strange warm bloom in his chest that seemed to realize itself so often around Crowley pulled at the contact of their fingers. 

“Oh - dear I’m sorry -” Aziraphale began, but Crowley already drew back as quickly as if the contact had burned him. “I didn’t - did I harm you, Crowley?”

“‘Course not,” Crowley replied. He picked up the tankard and smoothly refilled Aziraphale’s glass and then his own. 

Eventually (and after their table had been cleaned three times by three different employees and someone who might have been a manager of some sort had arrived to make sure everything was “alright here”) they realized their welcome may have been overstayed. Aziraphale, mortified when comprehension finally dawned, overpaid and over-blessed and bustled both of their over-inebriated selves out the door and through the crowd still waiting for seats. 

“This was - well, this was rather _nice_ , Crowley,” Aziraphale said as they stood on the street in front of Petronius’. 

“It was fine,” Crowley replied, but it had been a long four thousand years, and Aziraphale had become acquainted with more than a few of Crowley’s expressions. This one, in which there was a small twist at the corner of his mouth and a crinkle at the corner of his eyes (no matter how much he wished to hide them), indicated that Crowley was a bit more pleased than he wished to let on. 

“Thank you, for accompanying me,” Aziraphale said. “Perhaps -” Aziraphale stopped. He meant to say that perhaps - perhaps there might be other meals in the future that they could share as they had in the past, only with more frequency. But that would be too close to fraternizing, would it not? Would tear straight through his paper thin defenses against whatever - whatever this is. He twisted his hands together, worried at his pinky ring, desperately searching for a suitable goodbye. 

The humans had it right, didn’t they? Pressing their lips together to say hello and goodbye, strings of promises of next time, next time next time made with their mouths. He wondered, just for one very small, almost infinitesimal moment, what it would be like to - to - 

“Perhaps I shall see you around, town then, in the future?” Aziraphale finally blurted out, tearing his eyes away from the distraction that is the twist of Crowley’s lips. 

“Perhaps,” Crowley agreed. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you enjoyed Aziraphale's perspective! Next chapter for Crowley's! And come hang out with me here [@soft-october-night](https://soft-october-night.tumblr.com/)


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter by racketghost!

He had _ambushed_ him. 

Yes, okay, _fine_. Perhaps he hadn’t, not really, not without being incredibly hyperbolic and perhaps a bit dramatic. But the angel had just _appeared_ , out of nowhere, in the middle of a crowded and overly warm tavern, looking flushed and soft and entirely too fucking touchable and had begun saying things like _let me tempt you_. To oysters. _Oysters_. 

The thing, Crowley thinks, sweating only the smallest amount (really, he’s fine. He is definitely not soaking through the linen of his clothes and his kiss curls are holding, yes, thanks for asking) that is a reported _aphrodisiac._

And Crowley isn’t sure whether Aziraphale knows that or not. He is not sure whether _let me tempt you_ had been some sort of cheeky attempt at flirtation or the kind of bungled pleasantry that a celestial being who played Nine Men’s Morris by himself would say in earnest. Should he flirt back? He hadn’t, not yet, but only because when the conversation had initially happened he had been stung into a kind of shelled misery by the events of the week: he had skipped his way to Rome to tempt a certain emperor into ruin and had found, instead, that the man himself had been the scenic equivalent of a rotting vegetable stand lit on fire being humped by a psychotic horse. The depths of that man’s depravity had awakened a void of dueling emotions; envy (at his undeniable creativity) and disgust (truly not a large enough word for what he had witnessed) in equal measure. 

Stuck in the quagmire of his own seething revulsion, (and yes, sure, perhaps a bit of shame) Crowley had responded to Aziraphale with a snappish indifference. 

So, in essence, _an ambush_. 

Though perhaps he shouldn’t admit to such a thing, he thinks, glancing sidelong at Aziraphale. The angel is, after all, one of the _least_ threatening looking beings Crowley has ever come across. All soft white linen and gentle shoulders and fluffy tight curls and pink cheeks and oh God— Satan— _Someone_ — do _not_ think about aphrodisiacs and Aziraphale. Don’t. 

Which means he is, of course he is, and playing on a repeating loop is the visual of Aziraphale with his eyes rolling back as he talks about some human madman that had found some way of making the most unpalatable of foods (allegedly) edible. No, not just edible, _remarkable_. 

Which, Crowley concedes, they _must_ be. Because there is a bloody line to even get into the place— wrapping around the blond exterior of the building and just as Crowley is about to surreptitiously stick a hand into his clothes and yank some sort of magic up from Hell to escort them to the front— a table opens up for them anyway. 

“What luck,” Aziraphale says as they settle onto a bench, having the gall to look, _again_ , earnest. 

“Is that what they’re calling it these days?”

He does not intend to sound so sour and attempts to smile in remediation. It is probably twisted. A smirk maybe. Hopefully not a scowl. Does he look pained? He feels pained. _Christ_. 

Aziraphale sucks ever so lightly at his teeth, lips pursing, as if he had not noticed. 

“I have _no idea_ what you could _possibly_ be referring to.”

“Of course not.”

Bastard angel. Using his powers to procure tables at popular eating establishments. His paperwork upstairs must be _monstrous_. 

Although, Crowley thinks, looking down at their bare table— _no wine_ — perhaps the angel had spared an expense on the service portion of his miracle. The wait staff bustle to every table _but_ theirs. Each time a jug of wine passes by Crowley feels like tripping the human carrying it and magicking it onto their table instead. 

But he doesn’t, of course, because he had witnessed enough bad deeds up close and _horrifyingly_ personal for a bit, thanks. So instead he sits with his bad mood and Aziraphale, his anxiety and his thirst. He tries not to focus on the sweat on the back of his neck. 

They wait. 

This would be easier with wine.

And Aziraphale, who Crowley had at first believed to be somewhat reticent to speak to his hereditary enemy, is now, at this juncture, downright _chatty._ Crowley isn’t sure if it’s the result of too much sun or too much house brown. Or perhaps too many lonely games of Nine Men’s Morris. 

Aziraphale winds his way through topics— weather (yes, there can be too much sun, he thinks, and yes, black had been a spectacularly bad idea in a city that is currently under the duress of so much of it), infrastructure (the forum, apparently, is gaining improvements. Crowley is not sure that he cares right now, clever as humans are), what brings Crowley to the city _(no,_ he doesn’t want to fucking talk about it, and he nearly spills the bottle of wine that had finally been sotting served in a bid to escape the question).

He isn’t even sure how he would begin to explain what he had witnessed to Aziraphale— this innocent, wide-eyed angel (and he still thinks of him often up there on the wall: wringing his hands and fretting over whether he had possibly done the wrong thing). No, best not to bring that up.

Besides, they have not been served food yet and already Aziraphale is keyed into a sort of frenetic energy that Crowley hadn’t even been sure angels to be capable of, nearly taking out a number of the wait staff with his increasingly animated hands. Angels, in Crowley’s estimation, are usually stodgy old tarts, sticklers for rules, and they never, _ever_ smiled this much.

He rests his chin in his hand and leans on the table, listening. It’s a nice smile, he thinks— and the wine makes warmth bloom throughout him— white and straight and soft looking lips and stubborn chin and wow, yes, there is an awful lot of light in his eyes and Aziraphale really, _really_ loves humans and isn’t that the most— 

_No_. Christ. Stop. 

It’s the aphrodisiacs again. The ones they have not yet been served. The _thought_ of the aphrodisiacs. Or perhaps just the fits of debauchery he had witnessed earlier. It is definitely not just Aziraphale. This heat is from the wine on an empty stomach. It _is_. 

He starts sweating again. He drinks. A lot. Too much. 

At one point he coughs and says something about _indigestion_ in an attempt to not talk about bloody human politics or _Caligula_ and isn’t that the _least_ sexy reason to not talk about something. Because Aziraphale will most _certainly_ want to think about his digestive processes. 

Fuck. 

But Aziraphale does not seem to be put out by the indigestion remark, or by his unwillingness to discuss his purposes in Rome, wiggling instead on the bench and lost in some dreamy train of thought. 

“Do you remember that place in Jerusalem?”

Crowley takes a drink. Again.

“You’ll have to be a bit more specific.”

“The darling place we used to go to,” he says, and the way he says it makes it sound like they had been dates. 

Crowley’s face feels hot. 

“The one with the goats?” Crowley mutters into his cup.

“That’s the one!”

Aziraphale is polite enough, it seems, to casually avoid mentioning that said goats had once taken quite a nibble out of Crowley’s backside one evening when he had leaned against their enclosure. It had not been one of his finer moments. 

“That’s why their bread was so scrumptious. Fresh milk and cheese from just outside.”

“Is that what you remember?” He murmurs and hopes Aziraphale can’t hear him.

“How could I _not_? How many varieties did they have on that menu? Oh help me name them—“

He begins counting them off on his fingers, shifting about, wiggling in the shoulders and every time he does there is the faint perfume of his skin that drifts over in the air. Soap and sunshine, flax, _bread_. 

The herbed varieties alone take up an entire hand. He really had very lovely fingers. Square and strong and deep, pink nail beds, little pale half-moons at the base. Crowley blinks. 

“I cannot say I ever spared much attention on the bread,” he says at last, because he is not helping in the least. 

It occurs to him that his sentence has a bit of a double meaning. He can feel the flush walking up his neck. Aziraphale, to his credit, does not seem to have noticed. 

“And the sweet ones.” His eyes close and he sighs at the memory. “Figs and honey I believe— you loved that one.”

He’s wrong. Of course he is. Crowley did not like the figgy one. The figgy one was _awful_ and figs themselves are awful— tiny weird fruits with dead wasps inside. No thank you. 

“No, _you_ loved the one covered in honey and figs. _I_ preferred the one with the pomegranates _._ ”

Aziraphale tilts his head the slightest bit and there is on his face a sort of dreamy besotted smile at the memory. Or perhaps it is because Crowley had, in fact, remembered.

“You _would_ prefer the pomegranates,” he says, and his stupid twinkling eyes twinkle at him some more. 

“What’s _that_ supposed to mean?” Crowley asks, because the dreamy besotted smile is turning teasing and sly and it is coaxing a matching curl out of Crowley’s lips without his permission. 

But he doesn’t get an answer— interrupted by a serving girl placing a plate of a dozen or so rather rank looking oceanic loogies between them. They glisten sickly and there is a waft of something like low-tide. People eat these. _Humans_ eat these. No, worse— _Aziraphale_ eats these. 

How are these blasted things considered aphrodisiacs. 

“Ah, here they are!” Aziraphale coos over the plate like the line of lumpy grey shells is something to appreciate and not throw immediately in the bin. 

Crowley isn’t quite sure what to say. 

“People _eat these_ , angel?”

“People eat _garum,_ Crowley.”

The name alone makes him want to vomit and he has half a mind of telling Aziraphale that since humans had the idea to leave old fish guts to rot in the sun and then _eat it_ , perhaps they should not be following their trend of consuming _these_. 

But Aziraphale assures him that garum has not so much as breathed on their meal today and the angel looks so earnest and so eager that Crowley lifts a shell in a show of good faith, delicately sniffs it, and then places it back down.

“Smells good enough, I suppose.”

It is suddenly as if the sun is shining out of Aziraphale’s face. A sublime sort of pleasure that Crowley finds these strange gelatinous lumps to smell _good enough_. 

It feels like whiplash. Yanked from a sort of sullied beginning of his week (he isn’t sure he will ever be able to scrub the things he has seen off of him) to now, to _this_ — Aziraphale is hedonistic in his own right but also wholesome, wholesome, wholesome. He is dizzy with it. The absolute purity of his enjoyment. There is no depravity here in this stone house, next to this exemplary angel. 

He’ll bite. 

“How do you eat them?”

And it’s an odd thing to ask for, help or guidance when he had been on his own for so long. Even for something small, something like this. But Aziraphale laughs and it sounds like the tinkling of a bell, joyous and maybe he _will_ be able to scrub the things he has seen off, with sound instead of soap.

Aziraphale stacks a shell onto Crowley’s hand and as he does their fingers brush. Salt water and vinegar between them. A conduit for something more than touch. 

“And then you sort of raise it to your lips,” he says, a bit breathless, “and tip it back.”

He might choke on his own heartbeat. He shrugs and attempts to look indifferent, as if the casual touch had meant nothing, he’s not sweating, he’s not eating aphrodisiacs with Aziraphale, he’s _fine_. 

He doesn’t even taste the oyster. Had he swallowed it? Must have. He doesn’t remember. There is an attempt at a smile.

He had meant to say something like, “good” or, “nice” or, “remarkable”, something to assure Aziraphale that yes, he is in enjoying this and yes, it is all about the food, of course, _remarkable_ thing Petronius has done here. But he doesn’t get the word out because before the oyster has wiggled its way completely down his throat Aziraphale is reaching for one of his own.

The loose sleeve of his toga opens for the briefest moment and there is suddenly a window of pale bicep, so much thicker and more vulnerable looking than his forearm. And then the hand attached to the arm is tipping the contents of the pale shell down a pale throat, Aziraphale’s eyes closed and tongue sliding across his bottom lip.

He _moans_. 

It’s a similar sound to one Crowley had heard earlier— at a party he wishes he could forget— by a person getting plowed in the rear while bent over a banquet table.

Crowley chokes. 

Full on gasping, eye-watering _choking_. 

He makes an attempt for his wine glass but spills it on the floor instead, the oyster he could not swallow apparently taking residence in his throat, hell-bent on revenge. Aziraphale says his name and reaches toward him and the damned toga gaps open again, showing off a bit more bicep, a hint of chest. Is there hair on it? He bats the thought away along with Aziraphale’s beseeching hand, endeavoring not to think about the angel’s chest hair or if _this_ is how he moans over oceanic sputum imagine the noise he might make if Crowley were to—

 _No_. Christ. Satan. Oh fuck.

He coughs some more and apparently Aziraphale’s angelic _something_ takes over because before Crowley can protest there are those warm thick fingers against his bloody _throat_. There is the feeling of cool water where a vengeful oyster had once been, soothing the burn, balming the irritation. 

“Alright there, Crowley?”

He won’t look at him. He fixes his glasses and stares across the street and wages a silent war against the flow of blood into his face, his neck, his chest, Christ alive his bloody _hands_ are probably flushing. Do not think about Aziraphale making that sound again. Don’t think about his hands. 

Which means he is, of course he bloody is. 

Crowley closes his eyes and exhales and opens them again because Aziraphale is chuckling softly and righting his wine glass. What a colossal fuck-up he is. 

“Sorry,” he mumbles, and flexes his jaw. 

Aziraphale had flirted with him and asked him on a date to eat the least sexy sex food and had been nothing but pleasant and Crowley had done nothing but sneak looks up his toga and imagine him bent over a table. He closes his eyes again. 

“Nonsense,” Aziraphale says, all sunshine, always. “Please, the rest won’t treat you nearly as poorly, I assure you.” Aziraphale, at least, had not been any the wiser of his errant thoughts. 

“Ordered them to do no harm, did you?” He teases, and feels, at least a bit, on safer ground.

“ _Never_.”

“Lying, angel?”

The nickname feels good, feels _right,_ as that stubborn chin juts out the tiniest, most stubborn of bits. “As I recall lying was a sin.”

This is _much_ safer— teasing and poking and watching as Aziraphale riles himself up. He needs to separate the idea of Aziraphale and those heady, indulgent things that humans get up to. They do not do those things. Those physical things. Angels least of all. It is not in the cards for them. It won’t be. This is enough. 

They order more oysters. They drink more wine. 

It’s enough, he tells himself, again and again. It’s enough. 

Later, outside, hazy with alcohol and the many hours in close proximity to an angel, he hesitates. 

“This was rather nice, Crowley.”

Of course he’d say that, even if the meal itself had started off as something of a disaster. Aziraphale is all pleasantries and politeness, enduringly so. It is a trait Crowley finds disarmingly charming, always, especially in the midst of a very deep buzz. 

“It was fine,” he says, because they are, after all, hereditary enemies. It will not do to seem too eager, especially if Aziraphale is being this forward.

A dance, he thinks, and he can feel his lips twist up in a smile. One of them leading and the other following. It had been his turn to follow, this time. And who knows what will happen next time, in however many hundreds of years. Perhaps he’ll lead. He’ll be better, when the time comes. He won’t think about Aziraphale’s hands so much. Or his mouth and the noises it can make. He’ll keep his eyes to himself and his hands to himself and be the perfect gentleman. Take _him_ out to dinner instead. He’ll do it right. 

“Thank you, for accompanying me,” Aziraphale says and wrings those hands together, frets at the pinky ring. “Perhaps—“

The ring spins again. One rotation perhaps for how many centuries they’ll endure apart. He hopes it’s not that long. He hopes. 

“Perhaps I shall see you around, town then, in the future.”

Crowley nods and thinks that it would be awfully nice to do that thing that humans do— the pressing of mouths against each other— just a bit, just to say goodbye.

But he doesn’t, of course he doesn’t. 

“Perhaps,” he says instead, and walks out into the burgeoning evening, thinking of ambushes and angels and feeling, finally, _clean_. 


End file.
